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The hidden realities of Britain's adult literacy crisis are revealed in this shocking and moving new series in which nine illiterate adults enrol for a six-month reading course that they hope will change their lives. Each of the participants has spent over 10 years in the education system and yet failed to learn the most basic skills.
In June 2007, Glasgow airport was targeted by a suicide car bomber. From Iraq to the IRA to the struggle for the establishment of Israel, bombs have played a decisive role in every terrorist conflict of the 20th Century.
Travelling across the Middle East, Europe and the US, Robert Baer, ex-CIA agent whose life was played by George Clooney in the Hollywood movie Syriana, hits the intelligence trail to talk to the men who make car bombs, and the bomb disposal experts. With shocking footage of actual car bomb attacks, Baer unearths the secret history of this ultimate terror weapon.
Child Genius, the landmark programme documenting gifted children, returns for a second series to catch up with the incredible young minds for the first time since they were featured on Channel 4 early last year.
So how have their lives changed since viewers last saw them? How do they balance their gifts with the challenges of growing older? And how are their parents coping, raising such exceptional children? Two 60-minute programmes provide an insight into how the lives of some of the brightest children in the UK have developed.
Charles Dickens - the greatest Victorian of them all, a man who was compared to Christ on his death and who in private, was driven by an adulterous passion for a woman 22 years his junior.
This film is a quest to discover the truth about his lover, with whom he possibly fathered two illegitimate children who died in infancy, and kept his private life out of the public eye.
The tale revolves around Byzantine financial arrangements, meticulously planned railway journeys, networks of safe-houses and bonfires of personal papers and private letters. It involved a number of ruthless acts which created misery and irreparable rifts in his family.
In his own words China's "Elephant Man", Huang Chuncai, tells his extraordinary and moving story as he undergoes surgery to remove a 15 kg tumour that has caused him a lifetime of suffering.
With the tumours now threatening his life, Huang has decided to have surgery before it is too late. I Am the Elephant Man follows Huang as he travels to one of China's leading cancer hospitals for surgery that he hopes will allow him to live a normal life, but which also carries terrible risks.
Award-winning journalist Rageh Omaar investigates how immigration has affected Britain in a landmark three-part current affairs series. Using Enoch Powell's explosive "Rivers of Blood" speech as a starting point, Rageh explores whether the apocalyptic visions of 40 years ago have any basis in today's reality.
He travels around the country, talking to ordinary people, and unearths some uncomfortable truths. He meets thinkers and players in the British immigration debate, including Equality Commission head Trevor Phillips, writer Hanif Kureishi and Lord Heseltine.
The series features a specially commissioned YouGov survey that reveals what British people, including settled immigrants and new arrivals, really think about immigration and what its effects are and have been on British life.
Winner of the World Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, In the Shadow of the Moon brings together, for the first time, crew members from every Apollo mission which flew to the Moon, to tell their remarkable stories.
"David Sington's film presses home the excitement, wonder and fear of a truly incredible journey" (The Times)
"Thrilling and moving... gripping" (The Guardian)
"A treasure trove of rarely seen footage" (Daily Telegraph)
Evolution by natural selection, argues Richard Dawkins, is the most important idea ever to occur to a human mind. 150 years after Charles Darwin first set out his radical theory in Origin of the Species, Dawkins tells the extraordinary story of his scientific hero.
Over three programmes, Dawkins encounters the rich evidence of the natural world, journeying from the Galapagos to rural Kent to the wilds of East Africa. He reveals the brutal elegance of Darwin's hypothesis, explains his theory and assesses Darwinism's often controversial legacy.
The Ark of the Covenant, the sacred container housing the stone tablets on which Moses inscribed the Ten Commandments, has inspired intrepid quests since it disappeared over 2,500 years ago.
For the last 20 years a real-life adventurer, Professor Tudor Parfitt, has been searching for the last resting place of the Ark.
Inspired by ancient documents and codes in Oxford and Jerusalem, the quest has taken Parfitt, a Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies, on an incredible journey across the Middle East, Arabia and Africa. And now, controversially, he believes he can finally answer the riddle of the Ark and reveal its location.
The Reverend George Exoo is a seemingly jolly Unitarian minister from Beckley, West Virginia, who helps people commit suicide. George claims that so far he has aided more than 100 people.
George extols the values of death. In addition, his new assistant Susan claims she'll help anyone kill themselves for the right price. "For George it's a calling" she says, "For me it's a business."
If you think your calling from God is to help people die, are you a saint or something more sinister?
The critically-acclaimed and award-winning documentary series returns with a new batch of wealthy benefactors seeking to change the lives of others for the better.
As well as highlighting the positive financial and emotional impact of modern day philanthropy, the programme also draws attention to Britain's social problems in a touching and personal way.
Sex Trips for Girls is a new documentary series exploring a growing trend where women holiday abroad not just for sun, sea and sand, but sex.
While destinations such as Amsterdam and Prague are popular with sex-fuelled stag parties, and the seedy bars of Thailand and the Philippines attract a number of male tourists with one thing on their mind, now the girls are getting in on the action.
Sex Trips for Girls visits two hot-spots in South America and Western Africa where increasing numbers of single British women are travelling for romance and sex - guaranteed.
Against a backdrop of the sexual liberation of British women overseas, the documentary explores the expanding industry of female sex holidays which are becoming more commercial and better facilitated than ever before.
The Insiders is a careers information project from Channel 4 Education that uses comedy to fictionalise the lives of six professionals as they blog about their day to day. From a policeman to an indie band wannabe, an actress to an aspiring fashion designer, the six professions cover a broad range of working life in the UK.
This truly cross-platform project, which spans TV, online video and social networking sites, helps teens get to grips with the ins and outs of working life resulting in an upfront, brutally honest and often funny account of the reality of work across six careers.
A ground-breaking, feature-length documentary, The Qur'an examines Islam's holiest book and asks what Muslims and non-Muslims really know about the Qur'an itself.
This powerful and beautiful film asks how - if the Qur'an is the ultimate and changeless message of God - such differences are possible, and looks at what the book actually has to say. And it travels the Muslim world to meet some of the vast range of people living according to their understanding of the Qur'an, from Ayatollahs to farmers.
Stressing the global primacy of sculpture, Waldemar Januszczak travels to the most spectacular sculptural locations in the world - from Peru to Nigeria, from Easter Island to Japan - and visits some of the most revered contemporary sculptors, including Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, James Turrell and the Chapman Brothers.
In three epic journeys, Januszczak uses sculpture to explore attitudes to sex, power and the cosmos, to demonstrate why sculpture has been, and will continue to be, at the heart of our cultural lives.
Continuing the Victorian Passions season, Upstairs Downstairs Love reveals the remarkable real-life story of a gentleman and his servant lover whose relationship transgressed the strict sexual codes of 19th Century Britain.
The erotic nature of their relationship was so shocking it was kept from the public for another 77 years. Recorded by the new art of photography, their pictures uncover a private world that remains a testament to Victorian class and desire.
Showing as part of the Victorian Passions season, Victoria's Men explores the history of Queen Victoria's intense and complex relationships with men.
Romantic and unconventional, she was prone to wild tantrums and uncontrolled outbursts of passion. She loved men and needed to be loved by them in return, not as a Queen, but as a woman in her own right. And privately, she revelled in her sexuality.
Victorian Sex Tourist follows Rupert Everett as he takes a revealing and witty journey retracing the steps of one of his great heroes - the infamous Victorian explorer and sexual whirlwind, Sir Richard Burton.
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